Holmes comes to India

The Sherlock touch in Tagore's poetry to Ramanujam's theorems.

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DILIP BOBB

February 26, 2010

ISSUE DATE: March 8, 2010

UPDATED: March 5, 2010 15:25 IST

HOLMES OF THE RAJby VITHAL RAJANRandom HousePrice: RS 295, Pages: 255

Here's one mystery solved: Rabindranath Tagore received help from an unusual source in compiling his famous poem, Where the mind is without fear. And just who was that mysterious contributor? Elementary, dear Watson, it was none other than the great Sherlock Holmes himself. There is, of course, no official evidence from Arthur Conan Doyle that his famous fictional detective ever visited India and the closest his sidekick/companion and Boswell, Dr Watson came was a brief stint in Afghanistan. But this seems to be the season for taking creative liberties with Sherlock: we've just had Guy Ritchie's film with Holmes as an ultra-cool hero with snappy dialogue, literally a new avatar, and now we have another, Vithal Rajan's Holmes as Indophile and active player in pre-Independence India. His pastiche is as imaginative as it is improbable but he does make the most of his literary adventure by giving Holmes and Watson a fairly major role in the events of that tumultuous period and influencing some of the prominent characters.

Thus, we have Dr Watson, wearing his medical hat, discovering the connection between malaria and a certain type of mosquito during his travels through India but lacking the time for proper scientific investigation, hands over his notes to a Dr Ross, then resident doctor in Bangalore. Ross, as we all know, went on to win a Nobel Prize for the breakthrough. The duo also meet a bright but opinionated young journalist called Rudyard Kipling who is gathering material for what would become Kim, considered his best novel. The rest of the book follows the same pattern till it almost becomes an excuse for name-dropping, from Motilal Nehru to Jinnah, Tagore and other luminaries of the time, including a flamboyant American called Clark Gable.

In fact, what readers will expect--Holmes as crime-buster--is restricted to the opening chapter where he solves the murder of a temple priest, but the rest of the book reads like a guide to India during the Raj with Holmes and Watson as narrators, protagonists and pro-Independence activists. That, like Ritchie's cinematic version, is a dramatic switch from the traditional image of Holmes and to an extent, Watson. For all his fictional brilliance, Holmes was largely apolitical and conservative; here he is liberal, anti-imperialist and passionately involved in a range of issues involving Britain's policies regarding India. In essence, issues that have no connection to crime.

By the end, this is a Holmes as sociological warrior and witness to history, looking for important people to meet. Among them is Francis Younghusband, the legendary explorer, the infamous General Dyer, and apart from enhancing Tagore's poetry, he also manages the more Holmesian task of proving to the British that the squiggles of a certain mathematician called Ramanujam were actually brilliant theorems and not spy code. The only real connect to Conan Doyle's character is that he meets up with Moriarty, his fictional adversary. It's clever stuff, but a little too clever, very little detecting and history as adventure. Along the way, Holmes also manages to invent the doosra, which is an amazingly accurate way to describe this book.

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